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Heritage Award for Garden City Home

Freeland Rees Roberts’ sensitive alteration and extension of an early Garden City home in a pioneering Parker and Unwin group design has won the best ‘Major Works Award’ in the 2018 Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation ‘Heritage Awards’.

A fascinating feature is the creation of an adapted form of ‘sleeping balcony’, believed to be the first constructed in the Garden City since the early-mid twentieth century. The sleeping balcony was fashionable in Edwardian England, and a feature in a number of early Garden City homes in Letchworth. It was designed to secure the benefits of sleeping in the ‘open air’, while protected from the elements,and still in the comfort of one’s own bed. The top sliding sash to each of the windows can be lowered to create a rudimentary form of sleeping balcony.